Equivalence class partition is a type of software testing design technique which divides the input test data of the application into partitions with similar elements. The assumption is testing one data value from each partition is equivalent to testing the entire partition. At least one equivalent data from each partition, the test case can be derived.
For example assume that the application accepts a character from A-Z. Valid partitioning is the characters from A-Z is inclusive and invalid partitioning can be a-z, symbols, integers etc. The fundamental concept of this testing comes from equivalence class which intern comes from equivalence relation. A computable function in software system is in effect which is implemented as a algorithm and some implementation in programming language. Considering the concept of vectors, the input test vector given, covers the instructions of that algorithm. This gives the interesting relationship for the input test vectors.
Consider,
a customer name input field accepts 2 to 24 chars.
Valid partition: a-z, A-Z, 2 to 24 chars
Invalid partition: numeric, special char, less than 2 chars, more than 24 chars
Generally equivalence class partition testing is a black box testing design technique which can be applied to all levels of testing. In this technique, we will divide a series of test condition into partition which can be considered as the same. It divides the input data into different equivalence data class. We can use this type of technique, where there is different data accepted in the input field. There are number of test conditions we use equivalence partition test, divide all the test cases and from that we choose any one value from each partition in testing. The hypothesis behind that is, if one condition of partition pass all others value will pass. Likewise, if one condition fails, all others will fail.
Questions
- What is equivalence testing?
- What are the limitations of Equivalence testing?
